greatwhite

This is an incredibly entertaining Jaws rip-off , and pretty much a who's who of early eighties Italian exploitation. It starts out with a whole lot of slo-mo footage of a windsurfer, who looks a lot like the over-acting swat guy out of Night of the Zombies. Naturally he gets attacked by a great white shark. His freinds think he's drowned, and one of them gets her novelist father who is called Peter Benton ( I found this in-joke referring to Jaws' author Peter Benchley pretty amusing! ) to help find him. Benton in turn gets this movies version of Robert Shaw, played by Vic Morrow, to help as well. Vic is a crusty old shark hunter with a very unconvincing Welsh accent. At least I think it's Welsh....it's that badly done, it could be Lithuanian for all I know. They find a chewed up board. In a parody of Richard Dreyfuss' 'and it wasn't Jack the Ripper ' speech, Vic tells Benton that "It wasn't a mako, wasn't a tiger....theres only one species that could've done this". I don't know what species he's talking about, because to me the board looked like it was cut up with a jigsaw. From here on in, it's pretty much a Jaws satire, much like Castellari's The New Barbarians is a Mad Max 2 satire.

Benton tells the mayor to close the beaches, and like the mayor of every town beseiged by an unusually large, unusually bloodthirsty animal, he refuses. He doesn't want the town to cancel the windsurfer regatta ( would a few windsurfers in a bay really be that popular a tourist attraction ? Surely the town had something more interesting, like an antique shop, or a worm farm). Instead , he has a bunch of flimsy nets, and fences installed off-shore, and they hold the regatta. Naturally the shark gets through, or at least we assume this, because the underwater photography is so dark and amatuerish that you can hardly see anything. Surely Enzo could have gotten some better stock footage. The shark chomps its way through the regatta like Marlon Brando at an all- you- can eat buffet. The people on the shore run around screaming too, obviously thinking the shark can walk on land after seeing too many Jabberjaws cartoons. A whole bunch of other stuff happens, like people trying to catch the shark in various ridiculous ways ( in one case using a helicopter). They even call in the great white hunter 'Briley' (played by Romano Puppo - Great Alligator, After the Fall of New York) to try and shoot it.

This is another one of those films where a lot of people will see it, and miss the joke. When Jaws came out, everyone took it so seriously, and Enzo obviously thought to himself 'this is a movie that's screaming for somebody to take the piss out of it'. Morrows characterisation of the crusty old shark hunter is obviously intended for laughs, like a lot of the other ridiculous characters. Speilberg obviously has no sense of humour, or was jeolous of Castellari for making a more entertaining shark movie. He sued the producers, preventing this from getting a U.S release. This movie will also please Italian Post-Nuke fans. It is packed with actors from After the Fall of New York, 1990:The Bronx Warriors, The New Barbarians, and so on. It also has some gory death scenes, and the rubber shark doesn't look too bad.....though it does look a little fat, but thats understandable after eating all those people. Grab some fish and chips from your local takeaway, and enjoy!